


A most Brambleweeny rescue

by m_findlow



Category: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams, Torchwood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-17
Updated: 2018-01-17
Packaged: 2019-03-06 00:51:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13399920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/m_findlow/pseuds/m_findlow
Summary: Infinite possibilities abound when you work for Torchwood





	A most Brambleweeny rescue

**Author's Note:**

> Douglas Adams' genius is his own, borrowed for fictional comedic purposes with no disrespect intended.

Cornered. It was his own stupid fault, really, Ianto thought. He'd been the one to insist they leave the guns in the car. Who needed guns when you were out to dinner and a movie? Bloody Torchwood operatives, that's who.

Everyone else had managed to get out through the fire exit, except for them. They'd been busy distracting the six weevils that had burst in from God knows where. And now they were cornered, with no way of fighting their way past half a dozen seven foot tall, three hundred pound monsters. After fours years in the job, it was finally night, night nurse.

Just as he was contemplating how inappropriate it might be to grab Jack and kiss the living daylights out of him, after all, he was about to be mauled to death, so he might as well get one last moment of enjoyment out of life, there was a bright light, that cast the weevils in sharp relief, amidst the darkened cinema. He felt all tingly and fuzzy, like his body was covered in velcro that someone had just stripped off him, and then the cinema and the weevils were gone, replaced by a gleaming white room. To his relief, Jack was not missing.

'Uh, what just happened?'

'Probability two to the power of four hundred and seventy three thousand to one against, and falling...' chimed a female voice overhead.

'What was that?' Ianto asked.

'Why do you sound funny? Your voice is all high pitched.'

'I don't sound funny,' he argued. 'Why do you have a beak? And feathers?'

'Probability two to the power of one hundred and fifty six to one against, and falling...'

'I'm a duck!' Jack cried. 'Why am I a duck? Quack!'

'A duck who can talk.'

The female voice chimed again. 'Please do not be alarmed by anything you see or hear around you. You are perfectly safe. You have been rescued from certain death with a probability factor of two to the power of eighty two thousand four hundred and ninety six to one against. We will be restoring normality just as soon as we're sure what normal actually is.'

'How reassuring,' Ianto replied, blithely.

'Hey your voice is normal again.'

'And you no longer look like a duck.'

'I was just getting used to it too.'

'Two to the power of thirty nine thousand two hundred and twenty two to one against, and falling...'

Ianto looked around for a moment. 'Hang on, I feel like I've heard this announcement before.'

'Before?' Jack replied, confused, but not at the top of his list of confusing priorities at the moment. 'I don't know about you, but I've just been tapped on the shoulder by the leader of fifty purple flamingos who wanted to know if we could help him invent a way to turn snail juice into candy floss, and would we mind helping him direct traffic until they can collect enough snails from the highway.'

'Hmm. Just when I was thinking, what the probability was of us having a proper night off?'

'Reasonably low,' Jack confirmed.

'And the probability of us not getting mauled to death by those weevils?'

'About a thousand to one, I'd say.'

'And the chance that we should get beamed up by a spaceship at the exact moment that we were about to be mauled by weevils on the night that were were supposed to be having off?'

'Almost unbelievably improbable.'

'Good, I thought as much,' he said, suspiciously eyeing the purple flamingoes that were now hovering excitedly around Jack.

'Three to one probability and falling... Two to one and falling... One to one probability achieved. We've reached normality. Anything you can't cope with now is therefore your own problem,' the feminine voice advised.

The realization hit him suddenly, or perhaps it was the traffic warden sign that had moments ago, been pushed on him by a very officious looking bird. 'Ah, now I know where we are!'

'You do?'

'We're on a spaceship with an infinite improbability drive.'

'A what?'

'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Haven't you read it?'

'Um,' Jack replied awkwardly. Before he had a chance to answer, a door slid open on the far side of the room, and a small square robot slipped though before the door chimed, "you're welcome".

'That must be Marvin,' Ianto whispered conspriratorially to Jack.

'Who's he?'

'The paranoid android.'

'Like the song?'

'What?'

'Never mind.'

'Hello. I supposed you're glad to be alive,' said Marvin. 'Though I can't imagine why. Living is miserable. Every day it gets worse. I'm so depressed.'

'We're glad to see you,' Jack greeted brightly.

'No you're not. No one ever is. Don't feel the need to pretend on my account,' he intoned.

'Can you help us out, and tell us where we are?'

'I can, but I won't enjoy it. There's no point to enjoyment. All it does is remind you of how ghastly awful you'll feel when the next thing goes and lets you down again. Except the doors. They never let you down, those self satisfied, benevolent apertures of disgust. Don't talk to me about disgust. I disgust myself most days.'

Jack leaned in against Ianto. 'Well isn't he a bundle of joy? I'm not sure we really want his help, do we?' he observed. Ianto just gave him a quick shove back.

'Thanks for saving us, by the way.'

Happy or not, it was considered rude not to show a minimum level of gratitude when being spared from having your body ripped apart by lower life forms. And good manners got you a long way in the galaxy, especially when asked to comment on the quality of someone's poetry.

'Don't thank me. The ship did that all by itself.' Marvin sighed. 'Brain the size of a planet, and the ship doesn't even need me to save people from certain death. How depressing.'

'You said you could tell us where we are?' Jack repeated, growing impatient with their less than chipper welcome wagon.

'I did, didn't I? I don't know why. No one ever wants to listen to what I have to say.'

'By any chance is this the "Heart of Gold"?' Ianto interrupted.

'It is,' Marvin replied blandly. 'A trillion light years from the nearest galaxy.'

Ianto was quietly excited. He adored Douglas Adams and his witty sense of humour, but he'd never imagined any of it could actually be real. Now here they were beyond the end of the known universe. Part of him wanted to stay here and travel around for a while, having adventures with Jack in the infinite universe and all that entailed, but then he remembered that the rest of the team would be worried about what had happened to them. They still had a job to do back on Earth.

'Could you take us back to Earth, by any chance?'

'I suppose so,' Marvin droned. 'It's not like I have anything else to do. Stuck here alone for three hundred and forty millennia. The computer doesn't even know how to play galactic chess. At least that would have killed the first sixty millenia. Should have known I wouldn't be that lucky.'

Jack's brain began to grasp their geography and their predicament. Years of Time Agency training had taught him to focus on the important matters first. Anything concerning purple flamingoes and the invention of candy floss, interesting as that sounded, would have to wait.

'I thought you said we were a trillion light years from the last known galaxy? How are we going to find our way back home? That's sounds almost impossible.'

'Humans,' Marvin muttered, 'such tiny brains. Why you would want to go to Earth is beyond my enormous intelligence. Miserable planet, so I keep being told,' he said before beginning to hum obnoxiously.

'Not impossible,' Ianto replied, 'just highly improbable, which makes it the perfect destination for the infinite improbability drive to find, and since you and your immortal state of being is also supposedly impossible, we should be able to load your improbability factor into the drive and plot a course for home.'

Jack didn't seem overly convinced. It was the kind of lunatic explanation he'd come to expect from The Doctor, not from his best friend.

'We're out of tea,' Marvin informed them. 'Best news I've heard all millenia. I hate tea.'

'I'm not thirsty, but thanks for the offer,' Jack replied, surprised but the sudden seemingly generous, yet lacking, offer.

'No, not tea for drinking,' Ianto replied, 'tea for the infinite improbability drive. It needs a strong Brownian motion producer.'

Jack looked at him and frowned. 'You're scaring me now with how much you seem to know about these things,' he said, still not one hundred percent sure that they should be relying on a work of fiction to get them home, or that the weevils hadn't perhaps killed them, and that this was some kind of bizarre heaven. He'd always hoped that heaven looked rather more like Tahiti, but with Vegas Galaxy style beverages, and those cool gravity defying beds that hung from the roof instead of the floor.

'Please,' Ianto reassured him, 'I've read this book about a hundred times. Is there a kitchen on board?' he said, addressing the box shaped robot.

'Unfortunately.'

'Good. If a strong cup of tea can get it going, imagine how well it will work on coffee.'

'Now you're taking my language, Ianto Jones!' Jack exclaimed, clapping his hands together. 'A coffee powered spaceship. That sounds more like my cup of tea, pardon the pun.'

'Please don't expect me to laugh,' Marvin droned. 'I find jokes appalling.'

It should have been practically impossible to find any planets nearby that knew what coffee was, let alone had some available for sale, and who were prepared to accept earth credit cards and a dozen purple flamingoes as payment, but in the end, it just turned out to be highly improbable, as such things often were.

With its new super-powered, refueled tank of coffee, the atomic vector plotter went to work. It wasn't long after that when the Heart of Gold was once again hovering over the Earth, ready to beam them both back down to terra firma.

'Thanks for your help.'

'Don't thank me. There's really no point, rather like my existence. I haven't upset you with my disposition, have I? Humans always complain that I make them feel miserable. I can't blame them really. I make myself feel miserable.'

'No, not at all,' they insisted. Suddenly putting up with Owen's constant grumbling and snark seemed positively delightful.

'Are you sure you'll be okay out there all on your own in space?' Ianto asked, concerned for Marvin's solitude. Miserable as he was, Ianto was sure they could find a use for him, and his planet sized brain, at Torchwood

'It doesn't matter. If a robot rusts on a spaceship alone, and no one is there to hear it creak, does it still make a sound? I don't know. I hate philosophy, it's so depressing. Built to last five hundred trillion millenia. Thank you, Sirius Cybernetics Corporation,' he moaned.

'But Cardiff is lovely,' Ianto tried to explain, knowing he was fighting a losing battle. 'You could probably do with a change of scenery. Nice view of the bay, perhaps?'

'Sounds ghastly. I hate water. All my diodes feel like they're rusting at the mere thought of it.'

And with that they made their awkward goodbye as the transmat beam enveloped with in white light.

And something that felt like velcro.


End file.
